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future benchmarks. Jacques remained at St. Peter Claver. Hughes installed a new pastor, Father Quentin Moody who refused to let Mike Valentino, who had already made donations, serve on the Finance Council. Looking back on the fiasco of being stiff-armed for trying to raise money, Valentino told me, “For months after that I went to Mass and sat in the front row, just to let Moody know I was there. I kept asking myself, Who are these guys? We could have raised $2 million in twelve months. But the campaign never started. How could I assure donors where the money would go?” Valentino’s plan for a full architectural restoration was aborted; by 2010 the rectory had been renovated, but Valentino no longer went to church. “I didn’t want to fight battles in my own parish or be a source of acrimony in trying to help. The whole thing was such a failure of leadership, failing to do what could have been done. My core faith is intact but I’m disillusioned and have no regular parish.”

The archdiocese in a 2010 report on Katrina’s financial impact cited $287.9 million in total property loss of which $235.9 million had been recovered. More than half of that, $125 million, came from insurance; $64 million came from FEMA reimbursements; and $47 million came from gifts and donations from other dioceses and Catholic Charities USA.7 The unrecovered loss was $52 million. Although the pie charts and columns put numbers in broad categories, the essay and data fell far short of a fully audited financial statement. Bruce Nolan of the Times-Picayune noted that the church was “severely underinsured against flood [damage] … with only $29 million” in coverage.8

In an urban area that had sustained heavy flooding in 1994 and 1995, and had mass evacuations from hurricanes in the years leading up to Katrina, why cancel flood insurance? The policies were backed by federal funds and reasonably priced. “They were having cash flow problems—not enough parishes sending money to Walmsley Avenue [the chancery headquarters],” explains a prominent pastor. “They realize now that canceling those policies was a huge mistake.”

The minutes from a February 26, 2007, closed meeting of Hughes and his priests’ council offer an instructive look at the subsequent closure of two financially stable parishes, where vigil protests arose. Our Lady of Good Counsel, in the historic Garden District, was on the National Register of Historic Places. The parish council leader had a pledge of $300,000 for an endowment if Hughes would reverse the closure; he refused. In the wake of the battering media coverage from the St. Augustine events, the priests’ council minutes are devoid of financial or infrastructure planning: “The whole plan is a pastoral plan that deals with the parishes, social service and the schools that will be looked at again at the end of April. Part of the layered look involves [the chief financial officer] looking at the financial pieces to see what it’s going to cost us to put this plan into effect and what’s going to happen with all the buildings and real estate involved.”9

“The whole plan” was never disclosed to the public. The minutes continue, oblivious to people in pews, but fearful that a process without any cost-benefit analysis or impact assessment might be discovered by the press: “The Archbishop asked for the strictest of confidentiality to avoid sabotaging the process with media coverage before the plan is finalized. If forced to deal with damage control the fear would be that final decisions could not be made in the atmosphere that they would want to be made.”

Professor of Accountancy Jack Ruhl of Western Michigan University analyzed the archdiocese’s public disclosures: “The 2009 Financial Report included a compilation report by a local CPA firm that states: ‘We have not audited or reviewed the accompanying Summaries … and … do not express an opinion or any other form of assurance on them.’ The CPA firm goes on to say that the archdiocese ‘elected to omit substantially all of the disclosures required by generally accepted accounting principles.’ In other